The production of John Ford’s “’Tis Pity She’s a Whore” that opened at the Public Theater the first week of April, directed by JoAnne Akalaitis, is surprisingly engrossing. Like the production of “Pericles” that Michael Greif directed earlier this season, it features a company of capable actors, two able stars, a consistent vision of the play, and a couple of tour-de-force performance from actors in secondary roles. The stars are Val Kilmer and Jeanne Tripplehorn, who play the siblings Giovanni and Annabella—Giovanni being the young man who, against some of the best advice in Jacobean tragedy, enters into an incestuous relationship with his sister at the beginning of the play and, at the end of it, appears at a banquet with her heart on a stake.
Mr. Kilmer played rock idol Jim Morrison in Oliver Stone’s “The Doors.” He also played a rock star in one of those Zucker/Abrahams spoofs. An actor like that, who knows how to play a rock star’s temperament—whether in earnest or in jest—as opposed to merely possessing one (like most of the young actors in the Brat Pack school), isn’t a bad bet to play a Jacobean revenge hero. Callowness and a deceptive air of durability are the key here, for Giovanni—historically, almost by definition—is Hamlet without conscience or intellect. Watching him in the grip of something larger than himself, we have to believe that he thinks he is in control.
In the case of Annabella, we have to believe that she could go from thinking incest unthinkable to thinking it no big deal, and in very short order. If Annabella is too degenerate or too simple, her seduction will fail to be interesting, and that’s why it isn’t a bad idea, either, to cast an actress who knows how to play a victim without playing a sap. Miss Tripplehorn has some experience in this area. (She appears in the controversial date-rape scene in the slasher movie “Basic Instinct,” and she got browbeaten a lot and slathered with Vaseline in John Patrick Shanley’s last play, also at the Public.) Here she manages to seem both intelligent and vulnerable. Watching Mr. Kilmer come on to her, you almost begin to feel that if he were your brother you’d put out, too.
Unlike Mr. Kilmer, Miss Tripplehorn has trouble with the poetry, but she makes intelligible a particular brand of female naïveté, which the play, especially in Miss Akalaitis’s production, proves to be about. Jacobean revenge tragedy amounted to little more than the seventeenth-century version of “Basic Instinct,” but even cheap thrills command a subtext, and Miss Akalaitis’s production suggests that the subtext of Ford’s play is the phenomenon we now view as sexual harassment—the process by which predatory men prevail with certain women by trading on the very customs and laws that make those women feel safe. In Ford’s play, woman of all sorts (vulgar, innocent, elegant, corrupt) are turned against and punished for allowing themselves to be seduced—punished by the very men who lured them into their beds or their confidence. What this production skillfully brings out is that Annabella’s seduction and murder at the hands of her brother—the play’s paradigm for feminine trust achieved and betrayed—has more to do with sexual politics than with sex.
Miss Akalaitis has updated the play to the Fascist Italy of the nineteen-thirties, to create the sense of an ossified, decadent, and repressive moral order; and in dealing with the violence she has opted for all-out realism, which is the only way to approach these plays. John Conklin’s scenic design employs an idea of art-through-the-ages: a system of de Chirico archways, in which characters can eavesdrop or take shelter from the rain; sculpture fragments—a foot, an armless statue—that prefigure some of the violence; scenes in the Mannerist style appearing aloft behind a scrim; a Dadaist design on the cyclorama; and, here and there, surrealist distortions of humanity.
I liked Erick Avari’s Alan Rickman turn in the Iago role, and Deirdre O’Connell’s Putana and Ross Lehman’s Bergetto—particularly the way their performances marshaled contempt, affection, and pity. Less popular with me were the dumb-show wedding at the beginning of Act II and the poisoning scene—two sequences that find Miss Akalaitis up to her old pseudo-avant-garde tricks (twitching and slo-mo). I could also have done without Jan A.P. Kaczmarek’s incessant electronic music and Daniel Oreskes’ Mussolini impression, and without Jared Harris, who plays Soranzo—or, anyway, without his bluster and mannerisms and speech impediment. And Ellen McElduff’s portrayal of Hippolita as a raving, scheming villainess—which is how she is described—seemed at variance with Miss Akalaitis’s insightful interpretation: the whole point is that what the men say of the women and what we see of them are two different things.
“The End of the Day,” John Robin Baitz’s new play at Playwrights Horizons, has to be more interesting than Mark Lamos’s production gives it credit for being. Mr. Baitz is a subtle playwright; he creates characters of dazzling complexity—moral arbiters and moral victims, like the ones in “The Film Society” and “The Substance of Fire”—who walk a tight-rope between loathsomeness and vulnerability. For all I know, his new protagonist, an expatriate Brit physician (Roger Rees) trying to find his moral center in Southern California, is one of those characters; but Mr. Lamos’s production is such a hopeless muddle that you can’t tell. All you can say for sure is that the play’s two strains—a comic one, about the doctor’s relationship with the family of his estranged wife, and a melancholic one, about his relations with his own family and a cancer patient—never come together in any sort of harmony.
You don’t give a play a title like “The End of the Day,” and make sure that the phrase keeps cropping up in ways that mean different things—a reckoning, death, privilege, impending loss—and introduce an object that evokes all the same themes (in this case, a priceless George Stubbs painting), unless you have a pretty good idea of what you’re doing. And you don’t write a play, like this one, in which actors are supposed to double in complementary and contrasting roles, British and American, unless it’s your intention for the audience to be surprised and delighted by the range and subtlety of the performances. Unfortunately, Mr. Lamos has come at Baitz’s play with the same sledgehammer approach that made his recent productions of “Measure for Measure” and “Our Country’s Good” so numbingly boring. From a cast that includes fine actors like Nancy Marchand and Jean Smart he has elicited caricatures of such desperate crudeness and sameness that the doubling is an embarrassment and all Mr. Baitz’s careful observations go for naught.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t steer anyone away from a Baitz play (or from a chance to see Mr. Rees or Miss Marchand perform), but in this case I’d say wait for another production. There’s bound to be one.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, April 20, 1992